In recent years, the manufacturing line for semiconductor devices in which this type of exposure apparatus is used includes a plurality of units called bays in which treatment apparatuses with the same type of functions are brought together within a vast clean room. A layout that employs a job-shop system has become mainstream. In the job-shop system, the bays are coupled together by a transfer robot and a belt conveyer.
As the workpiece treated in that manufacturing line, a wafer with a large diameter of, for example, 12 inches is used. In the production system, thousands of semiconductor chips are manufactured from one wafer.
However, with this job-shop system, in the case where a plurality of similar treatment processes are repeated, the conveyance distance within the bay or the conveyance distance between bays significantly increase in length, and the wait time increases. Thus, the manufacturing time increases. This causes a cost increase, for example, causes an increase in work in process. Therefore, the low productivity may become a problem as a manufacturing line for mass production of the workpieces.
Therefore, instead of the conventional manufacturing line in the job-shop system, a manufacturing line in a flow-shop system is also proposed. In this manufacturing line, semiconductor treatment apparatuses are arranged in the order corresponding to the treatment processes.
While this manufacturing line in the flow-shop system is optimal for manufacturing singular products in large quantities, it is necessary to rearrange the installation of the respective semiconductor treatment apparatuses in the manufacturing line in the order corresponding to the treatment flow of the workpiece in the case where the manufacturing procedure (recipe) needs to be changed due to a change of products. However, this rearrangement every time the products are changed is not realistic considering labor and time for the rearrangement. Especially, under the circumstances in which huge semiconductor treatment apparatuses are fixedly disposed within the closed space that is the clean room, it is realistically impossible to rearrange the semiconductor treatment apparatuses each time.
There is the need for manufacturing semiconductor in very small quantities, for example, several pieces to several hundreds of pieces in a manufacturing unit for engineer samples or ubiquitous sensors. However, in a huge manufacturing line in the b-shop system or the flow-shop system described above, manufacturing semiconductor in very small quantities extremely reduces the cost performance. Therefore, other kinds of products need to be manufactured in that manufacturing line.
However, when a wide variety of products are input at the same time for mixed production in that manner, the productivity of the manufacturing line further decreases with increasing number of types of products. As a result, in this huge manufacturing line, very small-quantity production and multiproduct production cannot be appropriately managed.
As the exposure apparatus used for this type of manufacturing line, Patent Literature 1 discloses a conventional technique that exposes a plurality of wafers without replacing the mask. In this Patent Literature 1, while replacing the patterns of a plurality of masks installed in a predetermined chamber, the configuration exposes one wafer (substrate) to be conveyed to the inside of this chamber by transferring several times.